


A Stranger You Shouldn't Fear

by CitrusInVenus



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Drug Use, Drugs, Eventual Smut, F/M, Graphic Description, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Serial Killers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:07:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29835066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CitrusInVenus/pseuds/CitrusInVenus
Summary: Rey has finally aged out of her abusive foster home, now left on her own to tackle the world and figure out her place in it. However, it's not long into her newfound freedom before she receives a strange text from a mysterious man, promising her security and comfort. High on freedom, she agrees to meet up. But it doesn't take long into their trip before she realizes she's agreed to a meeting with a notorious serial killer. But things get confusing for her when he promises her something she's wanted since she was twelve: revenge.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	1. Pepper Spray

Rey held a million questions inside her mind yet couldn’t form her mouth properly to ask a single one of them. All she knew was that the man sitting next to her: as tall, broad, and imposing as he was, would be her new guiding light now that she had turned eighteen. Aged out of a predatory system that didn’t pay her a modicum of their attention anyway, she was now on her own, and figured she’d be hitchhiking across the country until a poor soul pitied her enough to let her stay in a room for free. Maybe she could hop between odd jobs and relish in her loneliness for a bit. But now she bounced in all directions in the passenger seat of this man’s car, traversing a rough and uneven backroad, yet he hadn’t said a single word to her since he’d picked her up from their designated spot. He didn’t appear to be upset or contemplative, Rey reasoned, but she didn’t dare test this man too much considering…well, he must’ve been a whole foot taller than her, and his arms were as thick as pythons. Still, her curiosity got the best of her, so she directed her gaze to the front windshield of his car, letting the desolate landscape (as much as she could see through the dirty glass) clear her mind, and then took a deep breath. 

“You could at least tell me your name,” she mentioned softly, pursing her lips, feeling a bit proud of herself that she had prevented her voice from cracking out of anxiety.

The man’s arm only shifted, his knuckles going white as he gripped the steering wheel. Rey wouldn’t dare peer over at his face to see his reaction, but she blinked in fear anyway and pulled her legs up to her chest. Her heart was racing: why did I agree to this meeting? She was just a lonely girl without a home and a family, looking for any direction that trended upwards. And this man had promised so much for her: not only a proper income and a sense of security, but proper meaning in life. That’s what she’d been searching for, ever since those bastards back at her foster home had stolen her soul for themselves and shattered it into a million pieces. But now wasn’t the time to think about that.

The man’s head tipped to the side and his cheeks puffed, eyes still locked on the road ahead of them which didn’t appear to end for miles.

“Ben. Ben Solo…” the man said softly, a strong baritone rumbling through his voice. It didn’t surprise Rey one bit, considering how built the man was, yet it still sent a chill down her spine and her lips twitched out of stress.

“Ben…” she repeated to himself, nodding her head softly before turning to look out the passenger window: the shrubland was now dotted with lonesome homesteads that sat surrounded by small pens of animals, but signs of human activity were as sparse as before. Was this man a farmer? Going to put her to work shoveling food for pigs until her arms fell off? She could do that. She could handle it. Finding a single reason to wake up in the morning and make it her life’s purpose was more than enough to reinvigorate her soul and find out who she really was. What she loved and hated. What made her smile and what made her cry. If it took a strange man to get her there, then so be it. 

With one of her questions now answered inside of her mind, and without any strong reaction from Ben, she found the courage to ask another. “Where are you taking me?” Her voice was tiny, and more impatience came through her tone than she would’ve wanted.

Ben sat himself up, his face as blank and expressionless as before, yet his eyelid twitched. Rey caught it just in time but found a bizarre sense of concern in her chest rather than fear. “I’m taking you home,” he responded, without much inflection in his voice, though it did seem he was trying to up her spirits a bit. And it did work. A bit. Though the worst-case scenario was still brewing in her mind…yet it wasn’t as potent as it would’ve been had she not armed herself with pepper spray, tucked away in her hoodie for easy access. He wouldn’t lay a finger on her if it came to that. 

“Am I going to be working on your farm or something?” she asked in genuine curiosity, though she was far more interested in an alternative. 

“In a manner of speaking...” Ben said with a small nod of his head. 

Rey’s eyebrows creased and she studied his face. “What do you mean?”

Ben finally took the moment to peer over at her: his dark, brown eyes held fire behind their glare, and Rey’s heart leapt in her chest. She could feel her face flush over and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

“Rey, you’ve already heard of me before and you just don’t know it..” he said, looking down at her with his tongue entering his cheek. All the fear in Rey’s body dissipated for a small moment, replaced with confusion: _what did he mean by that?_

“I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head and looking to the back windshield as another car came racing by them, the first she’d seen since driving out to these fields. She played with her fingers but looked back up at him. “If you’re a cop or something, I wasn’t planning on doing anything wrong!” Had she agreed to something illegal? Shown intent to commit a crime? Thinking back to their short exchange of texts, nothing leapt out at Rey that seemed out of the ordinary…except for the mystery behind the man.

Ben gave a small, awkward laugh that showed enough teeth. “No, no, I’m not a cop…” he admonished, flipping his jet-black hair back to reveal more of his striking facial features: a strong jaw and a noticeably large nose, to which Rey remained silent. “Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by…” he brought one hand up to do air quotes. “…’cop’. Definitely a few cops out there who have killed more men than me. Bastards. I think you’ll be better off with me than a pig.” 

Rey’s mouth went agape, and she shook her head. “I don’t…I’m…” She was beginning to think this was a huge mistake. No man this secretive had anything other than trouble stirring in his mind. That was a lesson she thought she’d learned before, but liberation and freedom must’ve dug its claws into her.

“Kylo Ren. You’ve heard of that name, right?” the man replied, turning his head back to the front windshield.

 _Snap_. Rey heard all four locks to all four car doors go down in unison. The car’s engine roared and the landscape around her melted into one. He was speeding up. 

Rey’s body froze. An overwhelming sense of dread filled every inch of her. _No. He’s kidding. Right? He’s fucking with you._ Yet the circumstances fit her conclusion. She couldn’t escape. Her fingers tightened around the pepper spray in her hand. 

“…you’re, not…” she mumbled, her face dropping and her eyes blinking to themselves: her nostrils flared, and she gripped the seat. “You’re joking, right?”

“I’ll let you think on it for a moment...” Ben muttered back to her, keeping his foot firmly pressed down on the pedal.

Rey didn’t say another word. A profound terror coursed through her body, like the peak of a rollercoaster, before it crashed down into the pit of her stomach. She felt powerful tears begin to form in her eyes, before letting out a loud sob. Her body was now shaking, and she pulled herself further back, as if trying to escape into herself like a black hole. Her head only shook back and forth. “No, please..” she said between heavy breaths, her eyes red and her cheeks stained in tears. “…please, I’m not…” she gripped the pepper spray harder in her hand. “…I’m just a girl, I don’t…” she sobbed loudly. “No! Please...I want to live…” her face went ugly. 

Ben didn’t react. His knuckles loosened against the steering wheel, and his head tipped back in forth as if warding off a newfound euphoria, before he finally pulled out onto a small, dirt road surrounded with sagebrush. “You’re gonna throw that pepper spray out once we get home…and don’t even think of using it on me or I’ll make good use of these fields out here,” he said in an accusatory tone, unfazed by her constant sobs and state of panic. 

Rey shook her head wildly and inhaled enough air to make her squeak between sobs. “..please, please, please….just let me go…this isn’t happening…” The pepper spray fell from her grasp and hit the car floor, rolling underneath her seat. 

Ben rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Rey, I’ve had my eyes on you for a while. I just wanted to talk to you about something.”


	2. Pills

The noises emanating from Rey went uninterrupted, and she was stuck between wanting to scream until her lungs went dry and someone, anyone, within five miles would come and rescue her; and wanting to whimper and sob to herself while accepting her fate as another unfortunate statistic. A victim of circumstance, of a perpetual process that would chew her up and spit her out before moving on to its next target. I shouldn’t have come… was the one thought piercing the crashing waves in her mind that accompanied her panic: she could only blame herself and no one else. Like it had always been. Apologizing to the world when it left its scars on her. An automatic response burned into her neurons, unchanging and constant, and what made her who she was.

 _Yes._ This was who she was. A victim with no agency.

The car rumbled for a moment longer, then came to a stop: the engine winded down and the sound of jingling keys pierced the sobs coming from Rey. “Stop! Please! I don’t want to be here!” she cried out, slapping her palm against the window of the car with all of her strength. She could see that lone car in the distance, immediate in its orange hue, still burning down the dirt road with no sign of turning back. Ben shook his head and sighed to himself, before quickly moving to grab at Rey’s wrist as she tried to reach underneath her passenger seat. “No! Don’t do that, you’re gonna regret doing that,” he said in a stern voice, eyes wide while he glared down at her through his untidy hair. Rey’s legs kicked in all directions and she screamed again, piercing Ben’s ears, and he gritted his teeth: _I didn’t want to have to do this…but maybe you should’ve broken the news with more grace, Solo._ She tried to pull her arm away and brought her other arm up to slap at him. “Let go! Please, please please please...” she sobbed. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!” 

Ben reached into his trench coat, made of a strong burgundy wool, and pulled out a 9mm pistol, bringing it up and digging it into Rey’s stomach. Rey’s body froze, but her chest rose and fell with her hyperventilated breaths. She pulled her arms back and whimpered. “Please, don’t...” she shook her head, trying to look at him through her tears, before the world around her began to spin. Her eyelids fluttered and she inhaled sharply, her hands shaking and her mouth agape. A noise came from her throat and she swallowed, before looking down at his gun. Ben’s own hand was shaking just like hers. _Just shoot me. Please._ A part of her wanted to scream those words and end life’s incessant teasing of her mortality, like dancing on a seesaw. But she wanted to live. She had to. 

“I’m not going to pull the trigger and I’m not going to hurt you. Take deep breaths…” Ben’s eyelids twitched again, and his hand remained unsteady. “…but you have to listen to me and follow my orders.” An intense sparkle burned in his eyes while he looked down at her, and Rey blinked enough tears away to look back into them: he's one of them, don’t listen. Her mind echoed back at her, and there was a small battle being fought between her instincts and her desire for revenge. Her body told her to run as far as she could, but she’d done all her running her entire life. Maybe it was a graceful ending to spit into his eyes and let him fire off the shot. To give one last fuck you to those who had hurt her. But she knew she didn’t have the courage to do that.

Her voice broke. “Let me go…” she demanded, her lips pursing as she looked back at him with a newfound anger burning in her gut. “…what do you want from me?” It was in this moment that Rey noticed the curiosity in Ben she’d been searching for: his eyelids continued to twitch and his hands shook back and forth, as if done of his own volition, yet the subtle anguish behind his face suggested otherwise. She swallowed back again, and another noise escaped her mouth. 

“I’ll tell you..” he said in a gruff voice, the muzzle of his gun digging back and forth into her gut: if he hadn’t practiced proper trigger discipline with his index finger, he may have accidentally fired a shot into her. “…but you cannot scream, and you cannot run from me. I won’t hesitate to put a bullet into your body and dispose of your corpse while considering this a missed opportunity. For the both of us..” he emphasized, gritting his teeth. A sweat formed against his brow. _He’s unstable…unpredictable._ Rey shook her head wildly.

“You’re a murderer, a monster. I don’t care. Let me go and I…” she inhaled, whimpering again. “…I won’t tell anyone I saw you. I promise.” Whether she would keep true to that word or not depended on the witness protection provided for her. But even that process sounded wholly exhausting. And Ben would echo that sentiment.

Ben’s arms were now shaky, but he took a few deep breaths and spoke again. “And throw yourself right back into the state’s hands? Sooner or later, they’re gonna get me...” he nodded his head to the side and his tongue came out to lick at his lips. “…and I’ll name you first when they’re throwing me in front of a judge.” His breaths were slowing down, but he couldn’t stop moving his limbs. “You’re staying with me or you’re finding an early grave, orphan girl.”

The muscles across Rey’s body were still clenched in fear, but eager to weaken so she could collapse to the ground and save her strength for once. The more he spoke, the more she grew both fearful and confused: _how much could he know about me?_ No one knew she existed except as a name in a file, right? Did he see her as a toy to play with? A poor girl who had nothing to lose and everything to gain? Or was he looking for a…

Rey gulped and whimpered again, squeezing her face. “I can’t…” she shook her head, one hand still firmly on the door handle, as if hoping it would unlock by pure, dumb luck. “...please, what’s...” she breathed, looking over his body: it continued to shake and twitch everywhere she could see, and her face dropped for a moment. Even in her absolute terror, she remained frozen and still, yet Ben seemed…restless. Impatient. Everything that came as a contrast to the notorious Kylo Ren she’d always heard about: cold, calculated, intelligent. But all she saw was a man who improvised everything because he couldn’t keep himself still enough to formulate a plan. “…can you please sit still, you’re making this worse on me…” she whined, pulling on the door handle again to no avail, though she hardly knew she was even doing it.

Ben rolled his eyes and deeply inhaled, pulling the gun back from her stomach but keeping the muzzle pointed firmly at her. “I’ll explain everything I want from you if you promise not to run from me..” he said, tipping his head at her and motioning to her hand, to which she looked over at and carefully pulled it back into her lap, still giving short sobs and sniffles. “I have a condition. You’ve probably never heard of it, unless you poor girls were delivered antipsychotics on silver platters because you talked out of line once or twice,” he scoffed to himself, wiping at his mouth with his sleeve. “Even then, you wouldn’t have a name to it. No one really does.” Rey noted the intense impatience coming through the man’s tone, and she curled her toes: was this a cruel prank? She was alone with this man, in the middle of nowhere, and he had dug a gun into her gut, yet demanded…her attention? He seemed more interested in talking about his “condition” than demanding she strip down for him or lay against the wall so he could execute her with every torturous parable he knew coming from his lips. 

She stuttered a bit and looked away, crossing her arms and sniffling to herself. “I don’t care what kind of condition you have…” she grumbled. “…you killed people. You killed women. You targeted women. Just let me go…”

Ben hummed to himself, shrugging his shoulders and stretching his arm out to stroke his hair back. “Yeah, yeah, that I did…” he sighed, pulling the gun away from Rey and looking to the front windshield with a sigh. “I killed all kinds of different women. Older..” he tipped his head to the left. “..younger..” he tipped his head to the right. His lips protruded and he kept shifting his knees back and forth. “Kind of lost its fun once they caught on to my usual routine. Lure them into my car, remote location, tie them up… Weird how that works..” he shook his head. “…that poor girl knew everything there was to know about me. Asked me when I’d start tying her up. I became a comedian telling the same jokes. How could they know so much about me and yet never catch me..?” he said with a shrug. “..they took the fun of killing away from me..” he said with the blink of his eyes, gripping the steering wheel.

Rey’s eyes lingered on his face for a moment, then ran down to the gun still in his hand, now laying against the dashboard. Her fingers tapped against her lap, and on instinct, she reached out to grab his wrist.

Ben caught her wrist with his free hand and looked down at her with a side glance. “OK, you’ve chosen the hard way...” he said with a sigh, while Rey tried to hit at him with her free hand. “Let. Me. Go! I just want to get out of here…” she cried out. Ben lifted himself and reached into his back pocket, pulling out an unmarked bottle of pills full of small, rounded white pills. Rey eyed it with a newfound fear. “No, no, please…I can’t...” she pleaded. Ben brought his hand up to grip the underside of her jaw, using his thumb and index finger to force her mouth open. “You try and bite me, I’m firing off a shot. No one would even hear it, except maybe a few birds hanging around. I can pay for a new car door too if the bullet doesn’t get lodged in you...” he said with a small laugh, opening the bottle and holding it up to Rey’s mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks and she admitted defeat. Ben tipped the bottle and several pills fell into her mouth: he quickly brought his hands up to plug her nose and hold her mouth shut with his palm.

Rey shook her head wildly and her eyes shut with force. _Don’t. Swallow._ Her tongue swished around her cheeks, attempting to hide the pills underneath her gums. But it was too much, and she swallowed them down with a heavy scratch against her throat. The hunger for air became overwhelming and she slapped at Ben’s chest, who unplugged her nose while she sharply inhaled. Ben thought it unwise to stick his finger into her mouth to ensure she’d swallowed it down, lest he wanted to feel just how strong her jaw was. Rey sobbed to herself. “God, why, please…” she cried, putting her face into her hands, sniffling. “...what did you...” She was certain Ben was playing a cruel game with her to exploit every flaw she felt she had. Like a rat groomed for snake food, the first seventeen years of her life were just proper molding for Ben’s sick game. _I just want everything to stop._

“Don’t be so dramatic. Here..” he brought the bottle up and tapped a few pills into his mouth, swallowing them down with a sigh. “...they help with my condition. Now, let’s get inside.”


End file.
